Simon Barnes recently joined Wildlife founder Chris Breen leading the Zambian Luxury Escape group safari. He has kindly given us permission to publish his article which appeared in the Times this weekend:
"I have a secret vice. I re-read books. Some I read again and again and again, always content with them, always rejoicing in the familiarity, always finding something new. In particular, I read Ulysses.
I have another vice, but after in indulging in it for more than a week, I think it might be the same vice in different form. I go back to places. Well, one place. Here I rejoice in the familiarity, always finding something new. I revisit the Luangwa Valley in Zambia.
I was co-leading a trip with Wildlife Worldwide. We drove out from the lovely Kakuli bush-camp to a place deeply familiar, where this mad untameable river seems to make an impossible 360-degree loop. The cliffs stand high over a river horribly diminished as the dry season flows towards its dramatic climax.
Lion.
Lions love a dramatic spot. They like sit on the top of these cliffs with their paws flopping over the edge. A lion doesn’t need to look for a safe place. A lion is a safe place. A lion needs merely to indulge his sense of drama.
It was on this spot, 21 years ago, that I saw lions for the first time. It was here I first witnessed that glorious hot cosy intimacy of lions at peace: sometimes striking commanding poses like the lions of Trafalgar Square, at other times rolling sloppily onto their backs like daft old pussy-cats.
I watched as one young male – his mane just beginning to get serious – slouched from one group the next and then lay down as if he were a puppet and all his strings had been cut. And I thought: this lion is almost certainly related to those first lions of 21 years back.
*
The social life of lions is full of contradictions. Unlike hyenas or wild dogs, they seem to make it up as they go along, improvising, falling out, snarling, making up. A pride is a central group of related females that takes on a succession of males.
The pride male – sometimes there’s more than one -- kicks out young males out when they get too sniffy round the back ends of females. Then they must go and seek their fortunes; when they are good enough and confident enough, they can try for a pride of their own.
There has always been a pride around here, and its female axis is likely to be stable. It would be highly improbable if these lions weren’t, as it were, related to me. How many generations? Three or four, I’d guess. Good afternoon, ladies: I knew your great-great-grandmother. We go way back.
Other connexions, too. Isaac Banda works at out next camp, Mchenja. I knew his father, also Isaac. He was a scout and he led me to those first lion, with his air of easy comfort in the bush, leaning on his gun and smiling at the lions with a kind of paternal pride.
*
But as I found new things in Ulysses, while Bloom walked along the Liffey and I sat by the Luangwa, so I found new things in the Luangwa. I saw a butterfly of outrageous beauty, a cream-striped swordtail. At Kakuli I found a pan-hinged terrapin, a flap-necked chameleon and an olive grass-snake, all new to me. One new bird, a grey-rumped swallow.
Going back to the same place is no way to build a great life-list of birds – but I’d sooner revisit the colony of carmine bee-eaters, and live with the sounds of their aerial squeaking, looking up as the sun catches their extravagant colours. As a lay in my grass hut at night, I could put a name to every sound I heard: wood owl and scops owl and barred owlet, Mozambique nightjar, painted reed frog, Peterson’s epauletted fruit bat, the whoop of hyena, the distant barking as a leopard disturbed a baboon colony, and the great crump of lion, using the Luangwa river as an amplifier.
This trip was not the first time I have experienced the thump in the gut that comes when you meet lions on foot. But like pain, like a dream, it isn't something you can ever quite remember, until you experience it again. It’s not precisely fear; I’ve been out there enough to know what’s safe and what’s not. It’s more vulnerability. That sense of being not so much a student of James Joyce as an item of protein. You can see lions from a vehicle: you only experience them on foot.
Another point. Ulysses is simply the best book, and the Luangwa Valley is simply the best place for wildlife. Why go elsewhere? Why read a lesser book? The peaceful bits of this trip were every bit as good as the headline moments, but I’d better give you a taste of the drama. Pitch darkness, lit by a single spotlight, in a vehicle surrounded by 200 buffalo, the lowing, crashing noise of their panic as they encountered the lions we had been watching, and then the detonation as the two pride males came out of nowhere to knock down a calf, after which, with the calf only half-dead, they proceeded to have a stand-up dominance dispute, roaring, slashing and raising dust as the poor calf staggered to its feet and tried to make a run for it –
These two rivers never disappoint. The Liffey and the Luangwa flow through my life. I will return, I hope, to both before long."
Simon Barnes. November 2010.
For images from a participant on this trip click here.
To check out future departures on Zambian Luxury Escape click here.
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